Read the Dealhack Market Review transcript after the jump.
Chris: Wow, January is already over. Many clearance sales wrap up today although many specials for Valentine’s Day are continuing into February.
One of the first obvious trends of this new year was easy to spot on Dealhack this week: flash memory prices have continued their downward movement from late 2007. Last year’s reliable benchmark of $10 per gigabyte shipped being a great price has now been pushed to as low as $7 in low capacity devices or even to $5 per gigabyte in 4 or 8GB products like SDHC cards for portable devices or USB flash drives for use with computers. We expect this trend to continue with these low prices getting easier to find while also migrating to the higher speed product variants as well.
The annual Photo Marketing Association Show starts today in Las Vegas and pre-show announcements have been flowing all week. Much more than at CES, the PMA show is where the major camera makers announce their consumer and pro-sumer camera lines. This year looks to be another one of evolutionary growth with ongoing advances in both image stabilization and image noise reduction technologies in particular. The convergence of point and shoot still image cameras and basic video camcorders is also moving ahead as the quality of video recorded by the small pocket-friendly cameras continues to improve. They’ve been capable of recording at "YouTube" web video quality for a while and are fast heading for the level of standard definition TV.
We’ll be watching for the most interesting new models although most won’t be available in stores until this summer or even later in the year.
The January 31, 2008 edition of the 
